Okay, this isn't going to be as well thought-out or authoritative as DavidB's post in the Dutch thread, but here's a primer:
Ukraine is roughly a continuum from West to East. In the Western extremes, the EU is generally seen as a force to be reckoned with, and Russia as an aggressive imperial power. In the far East, an area known as Donbass, and an area with a large Russian-speaking population, this logic is flipped, and Russia is seen as protecting Ukraine from Merkel and her EU cronies. Meanwhile, the areas in the middle are, generally, in the middle, with Kiev generally seen as more "western" than "eastern." Crimea, in a way, was an extreme version of this "eastern" way of political thinking, despite being located in the South. Crimea's population is overwhelmingly ethnic Russians, so this reasoning makes a lot of sense.
Here's a map of the election results in 2010 as an example of this divide:
One important note, however, as Crabcake somewhat jokingly put it, is that the "nationalistic" side of Ukrainian politics is generally associated with more pro-EU, Western-friendly politics, while the more "leftist" or "pseudo-leftist" side and support for "federalism" is associated more with pro-Russian politics. At the same time, basically all political parties try to portray themselves as "nationalist" and "populist" even if they don't use those words, or abide by them in any meaningful way.
From Ukrainian independence in 1991 until 2005, the president was Leonid Kuchma. Kuchma generally represented a light pro-Russian position, and relations between the two countries improved under his presidency. However, his main role was as a kleptocrat with almost comical levels of corruption. Long-simmering controversies blew open in 2000, when a bodyguard revealed secretly-taped conversations detailing massive amounts of corruption and numerous scandals.
In 2004, the pro-Kuchma, pro-Russia, and pro-federalist
Party of Regions nominated Viktor Yanukovych to succeed Kuchma as president. Independent Viktor Yushchenko ran as the main opposition candidate, and had his main base of support in the West. In September, just before the first round, Yushchenko nearly died from a poison attack and became permanently disfigured. After Yushchenko narrowly carried the first round of voting, he lost the second round under extremely suspicious circumstances. This lead to mass protests known as the Orange Revolution, and resulted in a second election and a Yushchenko victory.
Just two years later in 2006, however, Yanukovych was elected Prime Minister in a sweeping victory for his party. The woman who came in second that election was Yulia Tymoshenko. At the time her party was simply called the "Yulia Tymoshenko bloc," but has since become known as
Fatherland. Fatherland is a conservative, center-right-to-right-wing coalition of nationalist, anti-Russians and pro-Europeans. However, because of it's pro-EU leaning and (presumably) Tymoshenko's youth and beauty, it became known as the "good guys" in Ukraine's politics outside the country, and Tymoshenko became something of a darling in Europe and a key face of anti-Russianism, at least for a couple of years.
The result was an extremely combative and polarizing political situation which quickly fell apart and resulted in Tymoshenko's election as Prime Minister the very next year. Of course, this unified pro-EU government made opponents very nervous and Kiev was increasingly seen as gaining more and more power at the expense of the regional governments.
In 2010, Yanukovych and Tymoshenko finally squared off for the presidency, which Yanukovych won by just three points (the map of this election is the one I posted above). Of course, in the immediate aftermath of the election, Yanukovych decided to #LockHerUp, and threw Tymoshenko in prison for embezzlement. The next parliamentary election in 2012 saw the rise of a new political force to fill the void left by Tymoshenko (although her party still remained the second largest in the Rada) in the form of
UDAR. UDAR was lead by professional Boxer and celebrity Vitaliy Klychko, and occupied a more centrist form of pro-Europeanism, and was generally more populist and less corrupt (although of course these terms are relative) than its counterparts.
Things came to a head again in 2014 when President Yanukovych decided against signing an EU association pact which would set Ukraine on a path toward EU membership. This lead to everyone in Western Ukraine generally freaking out and general chest-beating in Eastern Ukraine, resulting in the widely-publicized "Euromaidan" protests. Yanukovych fled to Russia in February 2014, and Ukraine appeared to be on the brink of Civil War. Tymoshenko was relased from jail and declared a presidential bid. The interim government was much more pro-European than Yanukovych's had been, and this resulted in Russia's re-annexation of Crimea, where the new government in Kiev was viewed as essentially fascist. Fighting also broke out in the Donbass region, as the provinces of Donesk and Lukhansk attempted to form their own government of Novorossiya (New Russia). These insurgencies are ongoing, and have reached a stalemate with swaths of the area not under control of Kiev.
The elections in the immediate aftermath of Euromaidan were very wide-open and featured some big changes to the political system.
The main parties:
Petro Poroshenko Bloc - Successor to UDAR, lead by it's namesake oligarch Petro Poroshenko, generally liberal and pro-European, although not extremely so.
People's Front - A splinter group from Fatherland lead by the interim ruler of Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
Self-Reliance - A Christian Democratic pro-European party.
Opposition Bloc - A (weirdly enough) socially liberal, pro-Russian party founded in part by our friend Paul Manafort.
Radical - An agrarian populist party
Fatherland - A much weaker version of its former self, still lead by Tymoshenko.
The Party of Regions didn't participate in the Parliamentary elections, although they did nominate a candidate for President, who did... not so well, placing behind several minor parties. The Opposition Bloc is generally their spiritual successor in the Rada.
The landslide winner of the 2014 election was Petro Poroshenko, which was kind of a sigh of relief to outside observers, since he is seen as one of the most moderate possible candidates. Inside Ukraine, however, governance appears to have returned to a much more pro-European setup, creating a great deal of unease across the east of the country. The war in the Donbass has somewhat died down, after numerous negotiations and ceasefires, but at this point, it's hard to see how it will resolve in the long-term.
Hope this helps and that all of the Eastern European posters will point out all of my mistakes.
